Hello,

I have taken time to look at both ViaCAD and Alibre.

Alibre professional, I did have high expectations of this. After installation/ start up the UI looked very similar to solidworks/solidedge etc, so started to play. The first thing I noticed where the lack of surface tools,.. reading through the help files and rechecking the web site, I did note how they where really classing this product more of a companion for Rhino,.. (Rhino for the surfacing), there was a plugin for this, but it is only for Rhino3~3. I made a number of parts with various fillets etc and that worked quite well, the shelling was quite unpredictable in the selection of open faces, most of the time it simply would not select the face (add the face as open) so would be left with an hollow part with no open face, I got a little annoyed with that, so it is now removed.

Viacad pro. This does have many options for surfacing but have not yet found a way to produce a G2 surface, even the "net" surface appears to be based on sweep over multi rails, but will look further. The filleting was good and the shelling had no problems with the various parts I made. The only downside was the variable wall thickness option, which for selecting the face had to be done via a list (rather than selecting on model), that was a bit of a pain as it was a case of having to select through each named face in the list to find the correct one.

Personal conclusion,
I will give Alibre a miss (it does appear buggy), if I am going to be swapping between an application and Rhino, then that application will be MoI.
Viacad, This is a possibility, certainly as the Viacad 2d/3d ($99) does perform shelling, so it would possibly go well with MoI.

Just my opinion,


- manz